Follow TMS

Articles by Amy Goodman

29 Aug 2019 – Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, sailed into New York Harbor yesterday. The day before Greta’s arrival another activist ended a remarkable voyage. Frances Crowe, a lifelong peace activist, died at home at the age of 100. Frances Crowe, rest in power. Greta Thunberg, long may you carry the torch.

15 Aug 2019 – U.S. Attorney General William Barr said that the federal government would be resuming executions, with five scheduled in the coming months. This overturns an effective moratorium on the federal death penalty that has lasted over 16 years. Since 1973, over 160 wrongfully convicted people have been freed from death row.

26 Jul 2019 – Chinese authorities have been accused of systematically separating Muslim children from their families in the far western region of Xinjiang. According to a new report commissioned by the BBC, China is rushing to build boarding schools where children, mostly from the Uyghur community, are deliberately removed from their families, as well as their language and culture.

4 Jul 2019 – With the United States openly gearing up for war with Iran, while actively seeking to empower Saudi Arabia with the technology it needs to develop its own nuclear weapons, is it any wonder that Iran has just announced it will begin amassing and enriching uranium again? Iran had been adhering to the terms of its multilateral nuclear deal, even after Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement.

27 Jun 2019 – Over 350 migrant children are jailed in filthy, unsafe conditions in Clint, Texas. In Florida, more than 2,000 unaccompanied minors are incarcerated in a for-profit detention center run by Caliburn. Trump’s former chief of staff Gen. John Kelly sits on its board. Debating the fate of jailed migrant children is important, but the life-and-death crisis that they have been thrown into demands immediate action.

13 Jun 2019 – For the first time ever, a publisher is being prosecuted under the World War I-era Espionage Act. Julian Assange, co-founder of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, is facing 170 years in prison if he is extradited to the U.S. from the United Kingdom. The case could deal a monumental blow to the free press in the United States.

In his new book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” Yale professor Jason Stanley warns about the dangers of normalizing fascist politics, writing, “What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”

19 Jul 2018 – Imagine if Internet Service Providers had the authority to decide what websites you could visit, or what video chat program you must use to call friends or family. Large ISP corporations are trying to control the internet, to restrict the free flow of information, to restore their historical role of for-profit arbiter of what we can and cannot read, watch or hear. Preserving net neutrality will thwart the digital oligarchs, keeping the internet open and free.

12 Jul 2018 – In Thailand, the saga of 12 young soccer players and their coach successful rescue was a cause for global celebration. Juxtapose this outpouring of compassion and solidarity with the catastrophe facing millions of children in Yemen, and the ongoing debacle created here in the US by Trump with the forced separation of migrant children from their parents.

Johan Galtung is widely considered the “Father of Peace and Conflict Studies.” A Norwegian sociologist and mathematician, Galtung has taught around the world, helped found many institutions dedicated to building peace, and been honored with the Right Livelihood Award. He serves on the advisory board of Envision Peace Museum.

Q: “And babies?”
A: “And babies.”
That question, asked half a century ago, “And babies?” was posed by investigative journalist Mike Wallace to Vietnam veteran Paul Meadlo. “And babies,” Meadlo answered. He was an Army private who conducted a raid on a Vietnamese village. What followed came to be known as the My Lai Massacre. Hersh sees parallels with how the press is finally covering the immigrant family separation crisis now. “This could be a turning point,” he said.

At the UN, the U.S. blocked a Security Council motion to launch an investigation. Donald Trump was represented at the U.S. Embassy ceremony by his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who in his speech blamed the violence on the Palestinians. Lies take lives. An investigation is not enough. The occupation must end, and those responsible for the slaughter must be held accountable.

22 Mar 2018 – Fifteen years have passed since President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a coterie of neoconservatives, enabled by mainstream media cheerleaders, launched the invasion of Iraq with a murderous bombardment of Baghdad they branded “shock and awe.” Far from delivering the promised freedom and democracy and exposing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the illegal war killed, wounded and displaced millions of civilians.

15 Mar 2018 – Haspel’s career at the CIA spans more than three decades. Her work is shrouded in secrecy, but two things are well-known: She ran a CIA “black site” where people were brutally tortured, then she helped cover up the torture through the destruction of videotapes, against presidential orders. These alone should immediately disqualify her for confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

Among the landmarks of his activism are the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, ending segregation in public transportation; leading the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech; the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and marching with sanitation workers in Memphis, where he declared in his last speech, delivered on the eve of his death, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

Now at 86 years old, Ellsberg is revealing for the first time that the Pentagon Papers were not the first classified documents that he removed from his secure workplace. In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, he details his early years at the Pentagon, and why he took thousands of pages of U.S. nuclear war plans describing the lunacy of the U.S. nuclear war policy over 55 years ago. What he discovered is frighteningly relevant today.

22 Nov 2017 – “It’s time to resist against state power, it’s time that we take responsibility for our own lives … that we create a world which gives us the power to act, instead of hoping that other people will solve problems.”

2 Nov 2017 – As eloquently articulated by journalist Naomi Klein in her book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” disasters both natural and human-made are increasingly being exploited by for-profit corporations and so-called free-market ideologues to reshape vast swaths of impacted societies, undermining social-welfare systems, privatizing public utilities, busting unions and making obscene profits rebuilding. Post-hurricane Puerto Rico is shaping up to be a textbook case of the shock doctrine.

21 Sep 2017 – The history of resistance to fascism is worth recalling at this critical moment in U.S. politics. The stories of Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl — two young German women, one a Jew, another a Christian — should guide and inspire us in this darkening time.

“For the moment, of course, Trump is ascendant with the fossil fuel industry,” said 350.org founder McKibben. “But like many things that Trump touches, I think that this is a last gasp. People are coming to associate the insanity of going full speed ahead into this greenhouse future with the most reckless and crazy president that we’ve ever had.” So as climate-change-fueled disasters ravaged the U.S., Trump — the man who called climate change a Chinese hoax — was doing all he could to ensure future catastrophes.

While the people in Texas and Louisiana suffer the final days of rain and begin recovery, over 1,200 people have been killed by massive floods in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. The planet is drowning in denial. Climate change is real, and needs to be addressed.

Jul 17, 2017 – Watch our extended interview with Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell before he reports to jail at 4 p.m. Friday [21 Jul] in upstate New York for taking part in a nonviolent protest against a natural gas-fired power plant. Cromwell says he’ll also launch a hunger strike. The activists say the plant would promote natural gas fracking in neighboring states and contribute to climate change.

26 May 2017 – As Brazil is engulfed by a political crisis, we are joined in studio for an extended exclusive interview by Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached last year in what many describe as a legislative coup. Her removal ended nearly 14 years of rule by the left-leaning Workers’ Party, which had been credited with lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Rousseff is a former political prisoner who took part in the underground resistance to the U.S.-backed Brazilian dictatorship in the 1960s. She was jailed from 1970 to 1972, during which time she was repeatedly tortured.

When a suicide bomber exploded a bomb at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester this week, those killed were almost entirely from among her immense fan base: young girls — teens — and their parents. Jump to the first week of the Trump administration: with expected hubris, Trump and his surrogates touted a “successful” raid in Yemen. What went largely unreported were the 30 civilian casualties of that attack, many of them women and children, including an 8-year-old girl, Nawar Anwar al-Awlaki.

On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most powerful, controversial speeches of his life: “Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence.” The legendary orator and organizer, this young Nobel Peace laureate, laid out a bold condemnation of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

16 Mar 2017 – The world is facing the most serious humanitarian catastrophe since the end of World War II. Twenty million people are at risk of starving to death in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is responding by slamming the door on refugees and cutting aid funding while proposing a massive expansion of the U.S. military.

Juan Mendez, who was then the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, concluded, “I believe Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico.” Chelsea Manning is expected to be released on May 17.

29 Dec 2016 – President-elect Donald Trump exploded a half-century of U.S. nuclear-arms policy in a single tweet last week: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” With that one vague message, Donald Trump, who hasn’t even taken office yet, may have started a new arms race.

Sultana Khaya’s eyes don’t match perfectly. One of them is artificial. In 2005, a Moroccan police officer rammed his baton into her eye socket while she was peacefully protesting with fellow college students. He then gouged her eye out with his hand. Sultana is Sahrawi, the indigenous population native to Western Sahara, occupied by the Kingdom of Morocco since 1975.

17 Nov 2016 – Nowhere is the immediate and potentially devastating impact of Trump’s capture of the presidency felt more clearly than at the UN climate change summit here in Marrakech. Four years ago, Donald Trump famously tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Pipeline guards unleashed pepper spray and dogs on the land and water defenders. Democracy Now! video showed one of the attack dogs with blood dripping from its nose and mouth. The video went viral, attracting more than 14 million views on Facebook alone. Five days later, North Dakota issued the arrest warrant.

The movement to combat climate change is growing dynamically and unpredictably, and is facing increasing repression from the fossil-fuel industry and government authorities. There is perhaps no better example of this than the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Last Thursday [8 Sep], an arrest warrant was issued under the header “North Dakota versus Amy Goodman.” The charge was for criminal trespass. “Charging a journalist with criminal trespassing for covering an important environmental story of significant public interest is a direct threat to freedom of the press and is absolutely unacceptable in the country of the First Amendment,” said Delphine Halgand, U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders.

1 Sep 2016 – The Olympic torch in Rio de Janeiro has been extinguished, and the global spotlight has left Brazil. In the shadow of the games, an extraordinary event has taken place, largely ignored in the U.S. media: a coup d’etat against Brazil’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff.

Jun 3, 2016 – “The Executive Branch continues to claim the right to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, for secret reasons, based on secret evidence, in a secret process, undertaken by unidentified officials. I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing.”

May 17, 2016 – As protests continue in Brazil over the Legislature’s vote to suspend President Dilma Rousseff and put her on trial, Noam Chomsky notes, “We have the one leading politician who hasn’t stolen to enrich herself, who’s being impeached by a gang of thieves, who have done so. That does count as a kind of soft coup.”

People are putting their bodies on the line, with blockades, sit-ins, banner-hangs and a whole constellation of confrontational actions, driven by the urgency of the climate crisis. Here is just a sample of some of the protests from the past two weeks, as summarized by the climate action nonprofit group 350.org.

10 May 2016 – We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil. “People have started to realize, internationally but also here in Brazil, that although this impeachment process has been sold, has been pitched as a way of punishing corruption, its real goal, beyond empowering neoliberals and Goldman Sachs and foreign hedge funds, the real goal is to protect corruption,” Greenwald says.

Even in this high-tech digital age, all we get is static: that veil of distortion, lies, misrepresentations and half-truths that obscure reality. We need the media to give us the dictionary definition of static: Criticism. Opposition. Unwanted interference. We need a media that covers power, not covers for power. We need a media that is the Fourth Estate, not for the state. And we need a media that covers the movements that create static and make history. That is the power of independent media.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These were the words from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad-gita, which flashed through the mind of the creator of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the first nuclear explosion lit up the dark desert sky in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” goes a saying that is widely attributed to the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis.

The group, the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, gathered there on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, protesting the weaponized drones used in the Obama administration’s targeted killing program. It was only one of many of the group’s peaceful vigils.

Currently there are 107 men imprisoned there, 48 of whom have been cleared for release for almost six years. Reuters recently reported that the Pentagon itself, which is supposed to be under the civilian control of Commander-in-Chief Obama, may be resisting the order to close Guantanamo.

Author and activist Naomi Klein said the deal will “steamroll over crucial scientific red lines … it is also going to steamroll over equity red lines.” She added, “We know, from doing the math and adding up the targets that the major economies have brought to Paris, that those targets lead us to a very dangerous future. They lead us to a future between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius warming.”

On the outskirts of the northern French town of Calais, a massive, makeshift refugee camp called “The Jungle” grows daily, swelling with asylum-seekers fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Sudan and beyond. Their countries of origin are a map of the targets of U.S. bombing campaigns. More than 6,000 people here.

Three weeks after the attack in Kunduz, another MSF hospital was struck, this time in Yemen. The hospital was hit multiple times over a two-hour period last week, even though the roof was marked with the MSF logo and its GPS coordinates had been shared multiple times with the Saudi-led coalition. Every indication is that the Saudi Arabian military, using U.S.-provided bombers and arms, launched the strike.

Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have been dumping pollutants into the sky as if the atmosphere is a bottomless pit, able to absorb an infinite amount of our smoke and exhaust. Protest organizers have called for global actions on Nov. 28 and 29, demanding a fair, ambitious and binding agreement to confront, and ultimately reverse, the potential for catastrophic, human-induced climate change. If the leaders fail, many will be there to storm the Bastille.

Lincoln and King need little introduction. Dorothy Day was a crusading 20th-century activist who is formally being considered for Catholic sainthood. “She was a radical in her youth, underwent a conversion, and then started a movement, the Catholic Worker, to combine her faith with her commitment to social justice, the poor and the pursuit of peace.”

“It’s 160,000. That’s the number that Europeans have to take in their arms.” — Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. “It is our arms which are also killing and destroying these countries.” — Annette Groth, member of the German Parliament and spokeswoman for human rights for Germany’s Left Party.

Venice served for centuries as the crossroads of the world, a city where East met West and art flourished. This year’s Venice Biennale, called “All the World’s Futures,” showcases a growing community of politically engaged artists, who not only reflect the beauty and brutality of the world, but might actually change it.

What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped.

The United States was the only country in the Western Hemisphere that didn’t have an embassy in Havana. And Cuba was the only country in the Western Hemisphere without an embassy here. This story began when the U.S. succeeded in isolating Cuba from the rest of the hemisphere, and now the first chapter has ended with the U.S. ending its isolation from the rest of the continent.

The legal facade behind these heinous acts relied heavily on the cooperation of professional psychologists, who trained and advised the interrogators and supervised the progress of the “breaking” of prisoners. This cooperation was dependent on an official seal of approval from the American Psychological Association.

The ability of regular people to access encryption tools has prompted the governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom to propose special access to all communications. They want a master key to everyone’s digital life.

Dylann Storm Roof is accused of methodically killing the congregants, reloading his Glock pistol at least twice. He let one victim live, according to a person who spoke with the survivor, so she could tell the world what happened. This brutal mass killing was blatantly racist, an overt act of terrorism.

There are an estimated 80,000-100,000 prisoners held in some form of solitary confinement in the United States. The United Nations says the practice often amounts to torture. It is cruel and unusual punishment, and must be abolished, once and for all.

During the U.S. hunt for Snowden, Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane was forced to land in Austria for 14 hours after Spain, France, Portugal and Italy closed their airspace under pressure from the United States over false rumors Snowden was on board. Assange gives the inside story on why that plane was targeted.

2 Jun 2015 – TPP will fuel inequality, kill jobs, and undermine health, environmental and financial regulations. The negotiations have been secret, and the public has never seen most of the deal’s text. Well, this morning the whistleblowing group WikiLeaks launched a campaign to change that.

4 Jun 2015 – Evan Young was the valedictorian of this year’s graduating class at Twin Peaks High School, but Principal B.J. Buchmann told him he was not allowed to give his speech. “On a more serious note, there is something I would like to reveal to you. You may have already suspected this, but I hope this does not change your opinion of me: I am gay,” Evan said in his speech.

No charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself … don’t even have the right to documents, because you’re not even a defendant.” His skin is pale from years without sunlight, matching his prematurely white hair. But his resolve is unbroken, and the leaks he originally sought to publish when he founded WikiLeaks almost 10 years ago are still reaching the light of day.

6 May 2015 – As Palestine joins the International Criminal Court, former U.N. Special Rapporteur John Dugard talks about how an apartheid case could be brought against Israel in the ICC. “I’m a South African who lived through apartheid,” Dugard said. “I have no hesitation in saying that Israel’s crimes are infinitely worse than those committed by the apartheid regime of South Africa.”

“What do you hope to accomplish with this protest,” I asked a 13-year-old girl marching in Staten Island, N.Y. “To live until I’m 18,” the young teen, named Aniya, replied. “You want to get older. You want to experience life. You don’t want to die in a matter of seconds because of cops.” It’s that sentiment that has fueled the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.

One hundred years ago, more than 1,000 women gathered here in The Hague during World War I, demanding peace. Britain denied passports to more than 120 women, forbidding them from making the trip to suppress their peaceful dissent. Now, a century later, nearly 1,000 women have gathered here again, this time from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America.

As British writer John Berger has said of Eduardo Galeano, “To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious.”

What price would you pay not to kill another human being? At what point would you commit the offenses allegedly perpetrated by Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was charged Wednesday [25 Mar 2015] with desertion and “misbehavior before an enemy?”

The TPP, if passed, would implement trade rules that make it illegal for governments to create and enforce regulations on everything from environmental standards, to wage and labor laws, to the duration of copyrights. A law prohibiting the sale of goods made in sweatshops in Vietnam could be ruled illegal, for example, as a barrier to trade.

More than 4 million people commented on the rules, making this the largest response to any federal request for public comment in history. The large Internet providers will be prevented from discriminating against people on the Internet regardless of race, color, beliefs and, perhaps most importantly, how rich they are.

7 Jan 2015 – This week marks the 13th anniversary of the arrival of the first post-9/11 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, the most notorious prison on the planet. This grim anniversary, and the beginning of normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S and Cuba, serves as a reminder that we need to permanently close the prison and return the land to its rightful owners, the Cuban people.

“Doubt is our product,” states a 1969 memo from the tobacco giant Brown and Williamson, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.” It was a member of “Big Tobacco,” with Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard Tobacco Company, U.S. Tobacco, Liggett Group, and American Tobacco.

Dec 16, 2014 – As a psychologist identified as the “architect” of the CIA’s torture program admits he personally waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we look at allegations that the American Psychological Association — the largest association of psychologists in the world — secretly colluded with U.S. abuses.

It was President Dwight Eisenhower who severed relations with Cuba, on Jan. 3, 1961, two years after Fidel Castro took power. President John F. Kennedy then expanded the embargo, and his CIA invasion of the Bay of Pigs, intending to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, went awry.

“In today’s wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.” These words were spoken on Dec. 10, 2009, by that year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Barack Obama. Five years later, his pronouncement reads like a daily headline. The peace group Code Pink is calling on President Obama to return his Nobel medal.

Next Wednesday, Sept. 10 [2014], if your favorite website seems to load slowly, take a closer look: You might be experiencing the Battle for the Net’s “Internet Slowdown,” a global day of grass-roots action.

The Obama administration’s espionage case against alleged CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling is expected to come to trial soon, six years after he was indicted. In addition to Sterling, also on trial will be a central pillar of our democratic society: press freedom.

As the United States resupplies Israel with ammunition, more than 250 children in Gaza have been killed. Instead of providing weapons, the U.S. and the rest of the world should pressure Israel to stop the slaughter.

“We are disgustingly biased when it comes to this issue. Look at how [much] airtime [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his folks have on air on a daily basis, Andrea Mitchell and others. I never see one Palestinian being interviewed on these same issues.”

The United States has a long and sadly bloody history of destabilizing democratic governments in the very countries that are now the sources of this latest wave of migration: most notably in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. In the 1980s and 1990s, U.S.-supported military regimes and paramilitaries killed hundreds of thousands of citizens in those countries.

At the heart of his case, and of so many others, is the question of whether the Internet will remain a free and open platform for communication, or a commodity controlled by a few corporations, censored and surveilled by the U.S. national-security apparatus.

Bob Bergdahl’s remark about the U.S. war in Afghanistan: “I think this is the darkening of the American soul. It is where the guilt comes from, because you are being told you are helping, but you know on the inside that you are not.”

In remembering Maya Angelou, it is important to recall her commitment to the struggle for equality, not just for herself, or for women, or for African-Americans. She was committed to peace and justice for all.

The world lost two remarkable men in May, two African-Americans who helped shape modern history, yet whose names and achievements remain too little known. William Worthy, a journalist, died at the age of 92. Civil-rights activist Vincent Harding was 82.

16 Apr 2014 – Another U.S. shooting spree has left bullet-riddled bodies in its wake, and refocused attention on violent, right-wing extremists. A former leader of the Ku Klux Klan is accused of killing three people outside two Jewish community centers in Kansas City. As he was hauled away in a police car, he shouted “Heil Hitler!”

The IPCC, over 1,800 scientists from around the world, collects, analyzes and synthesizes the best, solid science on climate and related fields. The prognosis is not good. Evidence is mounting that we will experience more extreme weather events, including hurricanes and droughts, mass extinctions and severe food shortages globally.

In an unusual development, more than 100 U.S. Marines and Navy sailors have joined a class action suit, charging TEPCO with lying about the severity of the disaster as they were rushing to the scene to provide humanitarian assistance.

“With Sen. Dianne Feinstein we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”

Today a special on “kids for cash,” the shocking story of how thousands of children in Pennsylvania were jailed by two corrupt judges who received $2.6 million in kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities.

Second part of a special on “kids for cash,” the shocking story of how thousands of children in Pennsylvania were jailed by two corrupt judges who received $2.6 million in kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities.

Final segment of a special on ‘kids for cash,’ the shocking story of how thousands of children in Pennsylvania were jailed by two corrupt judges who received $2.6 million in kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities.

The public has confronted monstrous mergers before, and blocked them. So, too, have they faced corporate attempts to stifle the fundamental freedom of the Internet. Freedom of speech, freedom to connect and communicate, is the lifeblood of a democracy. The fight to preserve and expand the diversity and vibrancy of our media system is one that cannot be left to bought-out regulators and corporate lobbyists.

Pete sang truth to power through the epic struggles of most of the last century, for social justice, for civil rights, for workers, for the environment and for peace. His songs, his wise words, his legacy will resonate for generations.

A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, titled “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” directed by Brian Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Aaron’s life.

The triple-edged disaster of the earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear disaster will last for generations. The dangerous trajectory from nuclear weapons to nuclear power is now being challenged by a popular demand for peace and sustainability. It is a lesson for rest of the world as well.

There has been yet another violent attack with mass casualties. This was not the act of a lone gunman, or of an armed student rampaging through a school. It was a group of families en route to a wedding that was killed. The town was called Radda—not in Colorado, not in Connecticut, but in Yemen.